Kate Gilmore in Safe House. Photo: Teddy Wolff

It’s easy to hit a note of mournful solitude in a solo show—perhaps all too easy, especially when that solo show takes place in a big, stark space like St. Ann’s Warehouse. But while Safe House, a production from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, captures melancholy and loneliness, it doesn’t give us much else. Set against a bleak cement wall (meant to represent a handball court, but whether because I am not an athlete or because that kind of public handball court is much rarer in the US, I got that piece of information only from the script), on a stage strewn with detritus representing both literal trash and memories, Safe House, written and directed by Irish theatrical impresario Enda Walsh, is a journey through the fractured consciousness of Grace (Kate Gilmore), a homeless addict in 1990s Galway, expressed almost entirely through song (the music is by Anna Mullarkey). Grace is surrounded by phantoms: murky and fragmented videos representing memories; voices from the world that surrounds her. Many of the voices in both present and past jeer or bully, others give elliptical glimpses at her memories of family or lovers, but precious little of it is positive in any case. The memories often get violently erased in a very literal way, with the image painted over or scratched out. It’s clear that Grace is deeply wounded, though the snarl of addiction, trauma, violence, homelessness is never unraveled; she simply is a fragile, foundering soul, pouring her heart into song but remaining largely abstract and aimless. 

The combination of Mullarkey’s wistful music, Gilmore’s achingly vulnerable performance, and Walsh’s command of the production elements builds a striking environment and creates a mood, but little beyond mood. The problem isn’t that the snippets of memory don’t combine into a linear narrative–they don’t and they need not; as Walsh’s program note says, the abstraction and strangeness come from the events and scenes passing through Grace’s troubled and bleary mind. But the pieces don’t combine into a feeling of personhood, either. The program note also says, “I hope what it does have at its center is a real sense of this character, Grace. Where she has come from, how she is surviving, and what she wants.” While the videos (by Jack Phelan) give us something of where Grace has come from, it’s intentionally muddy; the images are scratchy, with desaturated color and intentionally oblique angles, and I did not get the sense of family structure and relationships that the script delineates. But how she’s surviving and what she wants? Neither of those felt strongly present, which makes it hard for the theoretically redemptive ending to have much impact. 

Mullarkey’s moody songs are musically intricate and rich, and Gilmore performs them with raw intention, but the lyrics have the quality of dark nursery rhyme; they’re full of affect and imagery but not interiority. The whole thing feels like an elaborate music video sequence, displaying the songs to great effect but with only a gesture at narrative or character as a way of keeping visual interest while we list. As a concept album, I buy it; as a work of theater, I wanted more humanity and more of Grace’s agency in the mix.

The production is undoubtedly impressive. Katie Davenport’s set continues to evolve new meanings throughout the piece, as the elements mirror Grace’s oscillation between past and present, shifting from trash to furniture, from the dangers of the menacing world to the safety of home. Gilmore embraces the physical environment with gusto, climbing on, clambering over, and crawling into bits of it in unpredictable ways. Adam Silberman’s lighting enhances mood with a variety of instruments and palettes, shifting from follow spots to stark house lights. Jack Phelan’s just out-of-focus videos capture the vague, not-quite-right quality of bad memories. And Helen Atkinson’s striking sound design brings in the menace that Grace feels all around her. 

It’s just that Grace herself is such a void. Granted, the gaping maw of uncertainty and indefinition at her core is part of the point, but she’s the sole focus of the show, and she’s a frustratingly vague presence. It’s true that Walsh is an artist who’s always preferred the sweeping lines of sketch to the precise details of character, with a particular disinterest in the female character. But it’s hard to build a successful solo show that so thoroughly resists both narrative coherence and interiority. There’s an opacity to Grace that makes her story feel generic rather than particular; she’s an archetype of a damaged woman. Grace may find a “room of her own” in the end, a place of safety, but it feels like retreat rather than claiming space. And without a sense of who Grace is in the world, why should we care whether she retreats from it?